 I'm Ann Schlemmer. I've been called Badass. I'm not sure we'll talk about it as we go through. Full disclosure, the quotes on the screen are family members. I didn't pay them. That was their response to me, but there you go. There you go. Technical difficulties are ready. Here we go. So you're going to hear more about me as the talk goes on, but I want to just give a little bit of an introduction as to who I am. Again, my name's Ann Schlemmer. I currently reside in Hood River, Oregon. Anybody familiar with the state of Oregon? I'm an hour east of Portland in the Columbia River Gorge. I feel super fortunate to be able to call that home. Picture of my family there. Where have I been? It's a brief condensed where I had schooling. I did an undergrad in finance. I have an MBA in entrepreneurial studies, but I myself am not an entrepreneur, but I work with them. So pretty awesome. I had a career in banking. And then, as I mentioned to some folks at lunch today, I fell into open source. And I've been in the open source space since 2008, which is when I joined Sun Microsystems and they got purchased by Oracle. And then I joined Percona, where I've been for 10 years. We'll talk about that a little bit more as the time goes on. And what drives me, open source, obviously, connecting with people and really mentoring, learning from others, and just being together is really what drives me. So it's great for us to be in person and having a chance to get to know each other and talk and have conversation. To me, that's what's so valuable. So as I go through this afternoon, this time of ours together, I really just wanted to talk about what has influenced me over the years to end up in the role as a CEO in tech. I will tell you, it is not something that was a life goal of mine. And you'll see that on the journey. It's about making the most of opportunities that came my way. And I hope that all of you are doing the same. So I'm going to start with my youth. And who are my biggest influencers, or what influenced me during that time? Parents, coaches, teachers, right? So I'm originally from Cleveland, Ohio in the United States, for those of you who are familiar or not. It's not exactly the middle of the country, but it's on Lake Erie, on the Great Lakes. Definitely shaped me. I don't think anybody else here from Cleveland. I tend to say it's a great place to be from. I still have family there. My oldest daughter actually lives there now. She went to school back in Cleveland, even though she grew up in the Pacific Northwest. She went to school in Cleveland, and she's now a Clevelander. So she decided to make her roots there. But that's where I'm from. I don't know about any of you, but I quite commonly heard from my mother, you're not everybody else. I usually heard that when I was saying, but mom, everybody's doing this. I usually got my full name, Ann's kind of short, so when you heard the middle name, you knew you were in trouble. So I heard a lot. I think that what happened with that, even though it was Ann, you're not gonna go do these things just because everybody else is doing it, somewhere in my subconscious, that really stuck with me. I'm not everybody else. I'm me. So that was a big influencer over time, because it gave me a confidence and an understanding. Hey, I'm not everybody else, right? The other thing I learned from my parents, another one of those voices in my head, was don't ask somebody else to do something for you that you can do for yourself. That really propelled me early in my career. As I have moved along into more and more leadership and responsibilities, it doesn't serve me as well now, because there's things I shouldn't be doing that I can do for myself, but it really helped me early, early on. And just also just the feeling from parents, and I hope you've all had a similar experience, of just supporting whatever your wishes are and giving it a try and not having the expectations of my parents were, do your best, whatever that looks like. If they knew that I was putting effort and I was doing my best, that's what counted. So I was like, that's good advice. Do your effort and however that looks, then you move on. It might have thought something wasn't of interest to me. I did my best effort, I was incredibly average. So we moved on and we found something else. So, huge, big influence for me. That helped me along in the path I'm on today. Another large influence for me was playing team sports. It was interesting, the speaker who was just in this room before was talking about stereotypes and being really careful with those. I believe there are stereotypes for a reason. I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to be a part of a team. One in the fact that you'll see in my career, I have commonly found myself in very male dominated places and it's a stereotype that all males play sports which they don't, but a number of them do and you learn how to leave things on the field. But I would say my biggest influences that have carried through life from playing on a team sport is the first one is learning to be on a team. That's hugely important. I've learned to win together and I've learned to lose together. So you're never alone, right? So that was a huge impact for me on being a team sport. Anybody who's done, doesn't have to be sports, has done music, done academics, anything. Practice, practice, practice, right? I've read a quote recently that says nobody is born with talent. It takes time, it takes development. You need to put the effort in. I learned that. I mean, how many, I can't even tell you. Like to think back, how many drills of throwing the ball and throwing the ball and throwing the ball and catching the ball over and over and over again. I use that still today. Even to be up here speaking to all of you. How many times do you have to practice speaking to become a speaker? So practice was another item that I learned from being on the team. I also, at an early age, and this is only upon reflection that it came back to me, is the importance of a coach. Seems really obvious in sports that there's a coach. You don't really think about that further along. And I've come to discover in my career, a coach, a dedicated coach is just as important as it was when I was developing my skills and doing sports as a child. A coach, different than a mentor. Mentors are important, advisors are important, but a coach is something different. A coach is really looking at what you're doing. So that was a big influencer for me. Again, a little bit of it was in retrospect. I didn't understand it all at the time, but helped me along to help me where I am today. I also had the experience of going to an all girls high school. That was impactful for all kinds of reasons. But as I look again, reflecting back and seeing that I've ended up in what would be male dominated or traditional maybe male careers over the years, I had the good fortune of at a very impressionable age when a lot of the studies have shown that a lot of girls might drop out of STEM, whether it's the science or math, because of social pressures. I didn't have that experience because I was in an all female setting. And our teachers expected all of us to be high achievers in what we were doing. We also, the studies show that there's bias, unconscious, or just bias that at a certain age, usually middle school to high school in math classes, teachers will rate the year everyone's hand is raised, teachers tend to pick on the boys who have their hands raised as opposed to the girls. Again, I didn't have that experience because it was all girls. I'm sure there was other biases going on, but I didn't have that one. And so the pressures that we had were academic pressures and they were competitive. They're competitive within, I mean, there was some fierce competition when it came to academics. But that was a great environment to learn in. It was also, I might have bemoaned it at the time. I love it now. We had the really strict uniform. It was brilliant. It got rid of socioeconomic differences. I was just reading this week about decision fatigue. There was no decisions in the morning except for, there was a couple of panics like, I don't have a clean blouse or I don't have the right color socks because I didn't get my laundry done. But it was another subtle teaching of we're all in uniform so you can just focus on the learning, which is an awesome opportunity as well. And then with their, I will say, I'm sure you can all think of a teacher. So I just, here's my shout out to Mrs. Lindstrom. Mrs. Lindstrom was my calculus teacher, my senior year in high school. She had us read, smart girls, and it says brilliant women is the other tagline. And Cosmos, I should say that one kind of hurt my brain a little bit, but the reason she gave us those was to push us, but also to teach us the lesson. I, one of these moments sits in my head. We had calculus after lunch, unfortunate timing. Mrs. Lindstrom, as we were getting towards the end of the year, we were all seniors, we were all graduating. And she was really adamant with us that she wanted all of us to continue in math. And one comment that she said to me that I was like, come on, was, I was assuming most of you were gonna go to a coed college. Yes, we were. You will be in math classes and you will make some people uncomfortable. There will be some boys in your class that will be uncomfortable because you all are really good in math. And I was just like, come on, right? Obviously I had friends, I had guy friends, and it wasn't a thing. Sure enough, I took calculus, my freshman year in college, person right next to me, always looking. What did you get? What did you get on your test? What did you do? What did you do? Could it be that I was a female and he is a male? I don't know. Could it be he was a hockey player and he's competitive and I'm competitive? I don't know. But when that happened to me, I thought of Mrs. Lindstrom. I was like, oh, she was giving us a message like, hey, you belong. You belong, you've earned your right. If you like sciences, you like math, do it, because you're good at it. So, awesome. That was an awesome memory that I've obviously carried throughout. And the lesson I've learned. College is college, right? We have a lot of influence from our peers and our professors. But again, if this is my journey, how did I become CEO last year? What was the influence there? I had the good fortune of going to Miami University at a time and here comes the dating. On the bottom where it says helping students since 1988, I was one of those founding students and that institution still stands today. That's from their website that I just pulled this week. Of course, it was gonna look great on the resume to say that you were, I was a finance major. You started a financial institution. Yes, right? Everybody was all in. There's a lot of guys. I made my way to a leadership position and there was meetings. I was the only female. Even though there was other females involved, leadership size, I was, at the time the only girl, young woman in the room. I was like, huh, how about that? Here I am. Okay, it's okay. I was comfortable with it. I had a voice. I didn't back down. Could be from the stuff I already went over. But at the age of 20, 21, here I was, given a lot of responsibility, asked for the responsibility. It was a volunteer organization. We didn't get anybody involved in the startup. There's not a lot of money to go around. So it was a fantastic opportunity to learn with colleagues, with peers, try something out. And again, I had a seat at the table that I asked for and I got it. Early career, so this is where I say I have two lives. My early career, I went into, I had the good fortune again, of being in a training program right out of college that was for retail banking and commercial lending. We'll say that the class that I went through, it was a nice blend of male and female, because it was right out of college. And banking was becoming not as male-dominated overall in the retail side of the house and the lending side of the house. That said, here's a couple cringeworthy potential advices that I got when I first started. I had a mentor who had said, because I'd be customer facing and working with corporate clients as a relationship manager, saying, okay, you should learn at least one sport that you can talk about when you're out entertaining clients. Doesn't matter if it's their sport, you should just know that sport. Well, for me, I was a sports person. That really wasn't a problem. But what I thought about was actually what was really important was learn how to make connections with people, learn how to find something common between the two of you. It could be music, it could be reading, it could be sports, it could be pets, it could be anything, but really, try and find that connection. That was what, right away, within my first couple months of being out of college, that was an advice that stuck with me. I'm gonna hear it right ready for this one on the sheet. This was on a piece of paper. It said, if you're female and you wear a dress to work, you should have a suit coat jacket on it, or it shows you don't wanna be promoted. What? What? In writing, it was in writing. I was like, huh, how about that? I had a couple dresses. I didn't always wear a suit coat. I was promoted. Gets better though. I remember really clearly, and I'll just put it up on this, I was out of the training program. At this point I had moved into doing corporate foreign exchange and in our rumor mill, our group of friends called up and said, oh, there's a new trainee and she wore a pants suit. This was the 90s. This was groundbreaking in middle America and Ohio that a young female trainee was so bold to wear a pants suit into the bank. I was like, I will tell you the first time I wore a pants suit, I was a little nervous. I did it the day after Thanksgiving when I knew nobody would be around in case anybody made any guff. I was like, whoa, look it, I'm up on stage in jeans. Like who would have ever thought that I would be doing a professional talking jeans when I was told you better have a suit coat on if you wanna get promoted. And then I was news breaking that someone wore a pants suit. So I'm thrilled to say we've come a long way. We have a long way to go, but we've come a long way. Impressionable, impressionable for me as a leader and being careful on what your experiences are, projecting what you think success looks like. You have to, I have to be very careful of that. I'm mindful of that. And I'm grateful for all of these lessons, right? All of these lessons have come my way. As I mentioned then, I got into Corporate Foreign Exchange and my first bank that I did the trading with, I was on a trading floor. So I was working with customers and doing their currency trading. I didn't trade for the bank, but I sat with the people that traded for the bank. My first trading floor wasn't as large as this one, but there were probably close to three dozen people on that floor. Three of us were women. One was an admin and literally her desk was up against the wall alone. And I myself and my manager, we were the only other women on the floor. I felt respected. There was times if you've heard the term locker room talk, every so often locker room talk would happen. And one of the gentlemen I knew really well, and I would just kind of put my head up and go, no, I can hear you, knock it off. I did as much for the woman who was off to the side as anybody, but it's like, hey, come on, where this is a professional area, know when and where to have jokes, right? I will tell people whenever we have new hires and I meet with them and I say, what are my values? I'm like, I like to laugh every day, especially at work. We spend a lot of time at work. We wanna have some fun. So I'm the first one to joke around and have fun, but you need to really know who's around and be mindful of what you're saying. So again, another opportunity that I got to be in a male-dominated, what was traditionally male-dominated space, and I found a space. And I will also say welcoming space, right? My colleagues would say that my overwhelming experience has been that my male colleagues have been as welcoming as my female colleagues. That's another underlying theme for me, has always been support. I have always, always found support from folks, even when I haven't asked for it, which I'm not very good at asking for help. Even when I haven't asked for it, I've received it. But it was an interesting move. So I will admit that the currency trading, I did it for six years, it was a rough industry, not maybe my best. So there came a time that my husband and I decided to start our family. And after a long discussion, he and I agreed, I ended up staying home. I dropped out of the workforce and I was home with my children for eight years. I recently, again, support, whoo, there was a big support. I recently was on a podcast called Women in Tech and Phillip Alsup is the host of that. And he asked me as we got to this part of my journey, was I resentful? Was I resentful that I left the workforce? And I was like, not at all. It wasn't an assumed in my marriage, or whoops, it wasn't an assumed in my marriage, in my partnership with my husband, that either one of us would necessarily stay home, but that it would be me as the woman, as the mom. It was a choice that we made after a long discussion. I am so grateful that our life choices allowed us to have that opportunity that I could be at home with our kids during that time. During that time off, out of my career, if you will, it really honed in for me to focus on what matters. What really matters in life in day to day. For me, what really matters in life day to day is family, health, friends, just life, right? The work is important to me, obviously, but at the end of the day, it's the people that you surround yourself with. That was really what I took away from that. So during that time, my family moved from Seattle, Washington to Hood River when my children were little people. They were just two and four at the time. That was also about a life choice, right? If anybody's been in Seattle in the past two to three decades, it's like, wha, it's exploded. My husband was doing commuting of an hour and a half a day and he's like, why, how is that even worth it? So I have the great fortune of living in Hood River and working remotely, but again, family and health first, priority and focus, really that was the gift that I, one of many gifts, but that was the gift that I got from taking that break out of my career because we'll talk about the open source era. When I came back to the workforce, I joke and said the gig was up. My youngest was in school full time. I was like, oh, my husband's name is Jimmy. I'm like, oh, the gig is up. Jimmy's gonna kick me out of the house. Actually, my husband started his own business. He started work for himself and we needed healthcare. So the gig was up really. So I happily went back, but when I first went back to work, I was not thinking career. This was 2008. As life happens, I had an extra neighbor who was a good friend. She knew I was going back to work. She works for MySQLAB and she's like, you know what, Ann, it's fully remote. There's this job opening. It's the consulting coordinator. It'll let you have flexibility to be with the kids, to be able to pick them up from school, blah, blah, blah. I think you should apply. I had my first interview with MySQLAB and then the next day they announced that they had been purchased by Sun, my criticisms. And so I didn't get the job for like months later because they went through the whole integration. I put this, this just gives you a whole perspective. My first week on the job, my boss was on vacation. So his boss called me. I want to say that I felt this was the most random question ever. He's like, oh, welcome, blah, blah, blah. He's like, you do have a cell phone, don't you? Okay, 2008, I'm like, no, I don't have a cell phone. What, you don't have a cell phone? I never had the flip phone. I never had any of it. He's like, you have to have a cell phone. I was like, really? Really? I have to have a cell phone. So at night I go out and there's this massive debate with the people I was at. They're like, oh, you need a blackberry. No, you should do the iPhone. It was iPhone 3G. I think it was the second iteration of it me. No, I'm like, okay, I've lived without a phone and now you're telling me I have to have a handheld computer. Is this really necessary in this day and age? Oh my gosh, yes. I'm an Apple person. I went with the iPhone. But that was my first entree back into the workforce was a question of, well, wake up to the century or in sisterhood, get a cell phone. Again, I had mentioned, I was with MySQL and I went with Sun. Was acquired by Sun and then they were acquired by Oracle. During those years, those ensuing years when I was there, I just ended up taking on more and more responsibility. So admittedly and by design when I went back into the workforce in 2008, I would say I was underemployed. That's not a great look for anybody to have to go into the workforce underemployed. But in all truth and honesty with myself and with all of you, that was my choice. Because again, I had some clarity on what's most important for me right now. I wanted that flexibility. I was providing health care for the family. I was providing income, had some stability, but also I was clear on that. And as was my husband, there was a time at Oracle that I said to my manager, no more promotions. And he thought I was joking. I was like, I don't want any more promotions because I knew what that level of commitment would be in expectation from me. And I don't think that it was the most enriching environment for me. I learned a lot at Oracle. I would not be bad-mouthing Oracle at all. I had some really good managers and some really great opportunities. But I describe my stress at Oracle as anxiety producing, where that's not a great kind of stress. We all have some stress. When I got to Percona, the stress was usually, as I say, it's usually the right kind of challenges. We all have a network. I discovered my network throughout my career and I continue to do that. I am not a very good networker. I'm sure some of you in this room might be fantastic networkers or you might know people who are really great at networking. I would never describe myself that way. That said, except for my very first job out of college that I interviewed for, every other position I've ever had, somebody came to me and recommended that I interview for it. Whoa, the power of the network. Power of opportunities, right? I encourage all of you to do those opportunities, right? 2013, I had the opportunity to, by random luck, interview with Percona because my neighbor friend who got me into my SQL had moved to Percona. She was interviewing or she was doing her training in Michigan, I was visiting my sister in Michigan the same week. I sent a random text, hey, thinking about you, saw you start at Percona, yeah, I'm with Matt. Oh, weird, in Michigan? Yeah, I'm like 20 minutes away, really? Matt says, come on in, why don't you come say hi? I'm like, as I say to the ladies at lunch, I was like, I don't have interview clothes. What are you talking about, right? I'm just visiting my sister. I raided my sister's closet to go and have this conversation. I was not looking for a job at all, but why not? Let's listen, let's, sure, I'm happy to have a conversation. So these are some quotes, right? I won't forget, Matt, I worked with that son. He was like, yeah, well, what have you been doing lately? Because he knew me as the coordinator. When I worked with him, he was a consultant. I scheduled his gigs. I told him where he needed to be when. So, hey, Ian, what are you doing? We need a coordinator at Percona. Well, I'm doing budgets. I'm helping the director basically run the department. We're helping with sales, he's like, wait, what? Hey, I've got this management role. I have this management role for our consultants. So seriously, the consultants at Percona, their specialty at that point was just my SQL. We're the top experts in the world. I knew that. That's why I'm like, Matt, hello. You remember I'm not technical, right? You recall that? Which is why, again, that quote in the upper right-hand quarter is my oldest daughter, Gracie. That was her note to me when I let family know, hey, I made CEO. She does her joke. She's like, yeah, lady in tech who doesn't do any tech. She thinks that's awesome. Like, yes, how'd you pull that one off, mom? Yeah, pretty much. But again, talking about support and opportunity, this is what you've had, Matt, brilliant, wicked smart, tech, who can also translate to non-tech really well, said that the team doesn't need a technical expert. The team needs a manager. We need some business management taking place. I said, okay. The next question really gave me pause. He's like, so how do you handle divas? Give me an example. I was like, what are you talking about? I found out when you work with technical experts in open source, heaven forbid, have any of you experienced open source conversations of everybody has an opinion? I'm like, who? I still got the job, but I have to say that that interview question still stumps me a little bit. You wanna know my answer? This is so bad. This is so bad. I had a, I really struggled. When did I do divas? I thought back to a salesperson who just wasn't listening to what I was saying and he just kept pushing and pushing. And I could only describe it as, well, I pulled out my mom voice and that shot him down. For those of you who ever get to know me, I've been described by others as very even keel, very pragmatic. So if I do pull out my mom voice, it's probably not a good sign. It's not a good look, it doesn't happen often. But I suppose that's how I deal with divas, but I try not to have divas on the team quite frankly. So opportunity. Opportunity looks different to everyone. We don't always recognize opportunity when we see it. Grab, grab onto that opportunity when it comes your way. I've had the good fortune of that. I put this one up because every day I don't stand or sit in my power. And then I don't know many people that do, right? There's challenges, there's doubts. Am I the right person for the job? Is this the job I want? How can I do better? Look at life. Oh my gosh. Like I don't know about the rest of you, but the 2020s have kind of been a thing. There's a lot, there's a lot, there's a lot going on. Maybe in another career I'll start really working on writing because I was like, we have a lot of material that we could write. I'm not a writer right now, but I think about, whoa, all of us collectively have been through a lot. Myself individually, I have been through a lot. At work, out of work, just in life. I will repeat myself, I have support. I've had amazing support. I continue to have amazing support. And I'd like to believe I continue to give support to others as well. That's what's so important. Women in technology, what does it look like? I am a fortunate person. I happen to be female. The founder that I work with, that he was the CEO when he just stepped down from the CEO back in October, he and I work really well together. We compliment each other in every kind of, whether it's a disc or predictive index, or Colbier, he and I are exact opposites on everything. That's great teaming that we have. That said, I think in one sense he's like, you're in, this is what you do. We've had conversations. When he first offered me a role a few years back, a leadership role, I said to him straight out, Peter, are you gonna be able to give me direct feedback? I'm a woman. I worry that you aren't always direct with women. Right? I asked him that straight out. And there's also cultural differences. He's not an American. And trying to understand that. Women have a place anywhere. Everybody has a place. I know for Percona, we can and need to do better in overcoming biases all the way around. We pride ourselves in the number of referrals that when we hire folks that people will, we call ourselves Perconians. Perconians will refer other folks that they've worked with in the past. That's all well and good if they come from a diverse background because if not, then you are getting little pockets of these groups that are hard to break through. It's great to see though, we have gotten better in the engineering side. Overall, our females have increased within the business. So in overall tech, but in some departments, there's too many meetings that there's maybe one female in the room. And I know that that needs to change. A few years back, I had read Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In. And at first I have to say I was a little judgy before I was like, oh sure, like I had a nanny, I had a blah, blah, blah. But actually that was terrible. That was a terrible thought that I had. Her book is really good. And it reminds all of us, right? We all have opportunity and try. Again, I mentioned earlier, I'm terrible at asking for help and asking for assistance. People just want sincerely to help others. And see you succeed. This is interesting data. This tells us, this is McKinsey did this study. It's a much larger study, but showing in Europe itself what the female representation is in these different groupings. And they're saying, right, the tech industry is having a hard time with workers and yet there's a whole segment that they're not even considering. What should we be doing better? And how do we change? So I found that interesting. Last year's theme, break the bias. We continue to do that work. I do think sometimes people look at me. So especially those that know Percona. I have had some people kind of look at me like, huh, how are you CEO? How are you there? I'd like to believe it's not because I'm a female that they say that. I think it's because I'm not tech. Because Peter's so, so deeply tech and our company is so well known for our expertise in a very specific database space. And I'm not that person, but that's okay. I don't need to be that person. So believe and go and see those beautiful mountains. Think about, how did I get here? All of us, it was a lot of hard work. A lot of support and it took time, right? It took time and perseverance. So I'll just leave you with, right? Steve Jobs, any overnight success, it wasn't overnight, right? It took a long time. So I didn't leave us with too many time for questions right now, but I am here until Friday. I have another talk coming up right after this, but I'd love to connect with any and all of you and I appreciate your interest in being here today.